The tea came to a boil, while I arranged six cups that shall hold it soon. The kitchen was quiet after fourteen days of frenzy. Like the liquid that danced in vitality from the heat, this room had been bustling with life until a moment ago. Quietude becomes most obvious right at the edge of a time of constant activity, I had recently learnt on returning to my Oregonian home after a week in LA.
Six cups, I thought to myself as I poured out the tea in this kitchen far, far away.
As a child, I grew up counting and re-counting the number of people I consider family. I was pretty bored, perched on a tiny hill, forty kilometers away from a smaller Indian city, away from and unaware of the world I now know and inhabit. There was not much to do, and so I enumerated on my tiny fingers, every once in a while to ensure that I have seven souls I call family as opposed to four that I later in a city-school realized constituted a nuclear family. Father, mother, sister, brother, aunt, grandfather, grandmother. Achan, Amma, Nandu, Anuettan, Baumma, Achaachan, Ammamma. Oh, and me. Seven.
I found it important and convenient that I had this number readily available at my fingertips. How many chairs at the dining table when the whole family got together? How many should the car fit on the trip to that wedding? How many banana leaves should I chop off for the lunch? Not that I made any of these decisions, but if you were to ask me, I’d have an educated opinion based on the number I had at my disposal.
It made me feel special that the number was seven instead of four. The child, searching for any scrap of uniqueness, for definitions in her confused search for identity in the world she had landed in — and who, as I’ve mentioned before, did not have much else going on — clutched the number seven proudly to her heart, as if losing it meant losing a vital fraction of the little that set her ever so slightly apart from ordinary.
We grew up and my brother got married. And a fifteen year old me updated the number to eight. His two kids came along, ten. But by then there were so many facets to life – excelling in school, dance class, friends and soon physics, research, moving to newer parts of the world. I grew up and found a multitude of factors that could define me, the number seven or ten lost its urgency. In any case, in the wisdom of a thirty year old, I realize that I am indeed ordinary and that in fact is a comfort rather than a dissatisfaction. So I haven’t thought of the number in a long time.
Ammamma passed away. Suddenly, out of the blue when no one was expecting it. She just left.
We all arrived at her home, our ancestral home, my childhood home – the only place I knew for the first few years of my existence – to bid her bye, and perform the rituals for fourteen days afterwards. The house was bustling with people who loved Ammamma, her sisters, the children of her siblings, and cousins and their families and neighbors who experienced her benevolence – the entirety of the village appeared at some point in those days at the doorstep to pay their respects. The kitchen, her kitchen was bustling with life, with aunts preparing tea, with domestic helpers cooking the meals, with men needing things for the rituals coming in with a million queries.
Only Ammamma was nowhere to be found. She would let no one do a single thing in her kitchen without her knowledge.
On the fourteenth day, when the rituals concluded, and the last of our kin left for their own homes, I entered Ammamma’s kitchen (where she did this* to me), to make evening tea for the family. I counted the number of people at home, and arranged the required number of cups. It was seven minus one, six cups.
Alleys 